How edumacated are you?

[mYTHmAKER]

From Wiki: Religiosity and intelligence:

 

In 2008, controversial intelligence researcher Helmuth Nyborg examined whether IQ relates to denomination and income, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which includes intelligence tests on a representative selection of American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief. His results, published in the scientific journal Intelligence demonstrated that on average,

 

Atheists scored 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. "I'm not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence are more easily drawn toward religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more skeptical," says the professor.

 

Also review: Religiousness, Spirituality, and IQ: Are They Linked?

 

~~~

 

Considering Taoism has an indistinct line between being a religion and a philosophy, I would be interested in exploring the link between level of education and Taoist practitioners?

 

Your comments and discussion would also be welcomed and appreciated

 

I think it's all a bit too simplistic.

First of all I would guess that Helmuth Nyborg is most likely an athiest.

I know some people who are quite intelligent - perhaps even genius - who follow the dogma of the church.

I have a masters degree

Edited February 6, 2009 by mYTHmAKER

[CarsonZi]

Personally I think "formal" education fills the mind with ideas and beliefs that will later in life need to be transcended. I personally feel that those without a "formal education" find it much easier to let go of their beliefs and live based on personal experience alone. This is my experience from teaching meditation and yoga to homeless people...many of which never completed grade school. But, just my opinion all the same.

 

Love,

Carson

[Unconditioned]

maybe it goes like this

you begin with traditional beliefs.

then you question it until you become agnostic

then you even question the existance of god.

then with an empty cup you can find your own answers.

people like lao tzu, da Vinci, plato, and einstein.

 

emotion tends to be associated with water

while intellect tends to be associated with fire.

 

 

Wow, that's VERY close to how things have gone so far for me.

 

Beliefs with enthusiasm

Skeptical of Beliefs

Agnostic

Sure there is no God (conscious person-like being pulling the strings)

Lost trust of all dogma ('theist and atheist)

Unsure of anything

Investigation/search

See things as they are

Create conditions to experience unfiltered Truth

???

 

 

 

 

 

Personally I think "formal" education fills the mind with ideas and beliefs that will later in life need to be transcended. I personally feel that those without a "formal education" find it much easier to let go of their beliefs and live based on personal experience alone. This is my experience from teaching meditation and yoga to homeless people...many of which never completed grade school. But, just my opinion all the same.

 

Love,

Carson

 

Hmm it could be a hindrance or an aid but as stated before once we're done with the tools we need, we don't need the tools anymore.

[CarsonZi]

Hi Unconditioned,

Hmm it could be a hindrance or an aid but as stated before once we're done with the tools we need, we don't need the tools anymore.

 

Perhaps I should have qualified my statement of "....ideas and beliefs that will later in life need to be transcended" by ending with..."or verified through personal experience."

 

And yes, all "tools" must one day be transcended.

 

Love,

Carson

[mentalground0]

I have a BA in Humanities concentration in writing

(as well as a certificate in Interactive Multimedia)

An MFA in Creative Writing fiction

and was told I had an very high IQ on those stupid tests in high school

 

So I don't know if IQ and education makes you more inclined to taoism

But I know for me I've always been a naturally inquisitive person as well as someone always searching for the deeper meaning

Edited February 7, 2009 by mentalground0

[phore]

college education doesnt necessarily mean that people have higher IQs.

I assume that there is a positive correlation though.

 

vcraigp seems to represent a child from a ideal society, where children arent conditioned to be closed minded.

 

unconditioned and myself seem to represent children from the more dominant society today, where children are taught to have closed minds. People from a society like this have to break free before we can join the real world.

 

[rookie]

Well, I know what a "plethora" means, if that's what you're after...

... but could it be?, that you are mad at something else?, and once again are taking it out on me???

 

 

not sure what this means...but I'm curious????

[rookie]

what are the reasons one would go to college?

[lightminefire]

I knew college wasn't for me before my high school years.

After all earthly information can't comprehend spiritual knowledge.

[goldisheavy]

All I have leanred can be summarized in one same fundamental Principle of Oneness .

 

Your web site is not standards compliant. It doesn't work in Firefox 3, Opera 9.52, Google Chrome 1.0, or Safari 3.1 (yup, I tried all of those).

 

That's definitely a very bad thing to do, especially when you advocate "Oneness", and yet make a website that only works only within a certain monopolist's browser.

Edited February 27, 2009 by goldisheavy

[DaoChild]

Personally I absolute love learning. I think it's absolutely incredible learning about the world and society. Even though it can sometimes complicate life a lot more than it should be, the more I learn the more spiritual I become. It's almost like "One part of me drifts one way.. realizes something.. and the other (spiritual) part can drift the other way". It's difficult to explain - but with so much intellectualism around me I can also join in that side of the world, but also realize why I shun away from it.

 

I crave simplicity, basics, fundamentals, lay-speech and so on. The more I learn the more I REALIZE why I love Taoism.

 

But that's just me

 

I'll be graduating with my BS in a few months, and from there I hope to have 6 + more years of higher education.

 

 

I always was (am) inquisitive about the spiritual and physical nature of the world. But more than that, I was always attracted to LEARNING first hand about it. That's how I became an amateur naturalist as a hobby - learning the voices of the birds, the plants and their medicinal uses. And that's how at a very young age I was deeply and extensively exploring spirituality.. It always just made sense to me

Edited February 27, 2009 by DaoChild

[Seth Ananda]

Expelled in year 10. opened a second hand book shop. Bored, escaped the small country town and the Fundie Cult i was brought up in at 17.

 

Began my Spiritual Quest. Since then have spent a fortune and nearly all my time on this quest. Have red 1000's of books, studied councelling, healling, massage, Philosophy, Mysticism in many forms, comparative religion, Martial arts...

 

Its my favourite way to live

 

Seth.

[Mokona]

School.. Gosh, okay. On second thought I would rather not post this.

[taiwandeutscher]

Well, German high school with 9 years was really fun, Latin, English, German, but I hated math, physics and chemistry, so I didn't want to study first.

 

After 14 months in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and lots of yoga, I met Taiwanese mountaineers in Nepal, and they showed me Taijiquan.

 

Back in Germany I started sinology, enthnology, comparative religious studies, switched the later for Chinese archeology, later to German as a Foreign Language. In the first 2 and the last, I did a MA, then a PhD, and it provided me with a nice job at a Taiwanese state university.

 

My classical and modern Chinese training make living and studying here a lot more effective, and my understanding of CMA is based on a good foundation of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese philosophy.

Often, my teachers and me know more about the theories than most Taiwanese students, so I can follow easily at the intellectual level.

 

But that does not mean it is easier to practice the Dao and to live it. So many of my training partners cannot talk about it, even are totally unconcious what they do, but they still are way ahead of my mostly "mind knowledge". After more than 25 years of practice, I find that I slowly can drop my mind or put it down to the Dantian, and things start to clear up.......

[DalTheJigsaw123]

This is definitely an interesting poll.

[Adam West]

Looking at meta-analyses of intelligence studies, I don't believe you will find any clear or compelling support for a correlation between intelligence and religious belief. You will find one for education and religious belief, as education gives one more opportunity to be exposed to non-religious beliefs, thus, you see a substitution. Not that one belief-set is more correct than the other, rather, exposure (through education or social support groups) is merely opportunity to aquire and internalize belief. I believe you will find a correlation between a low tolerance for uncertainty and strong religious and scientific belief structures. Further more, intelligence is more acurately represented as an indigenious range that we are born with (say between 100 and 120 IQ), and education and enviromental factors will effect the end result, which is plastic according to said factors. Most interestingly to me, many will notice that cognitive perfance is enhanced through cultivation practice (I speculate the development of the nervous system follows from such cultivation) or is diminished through lifestyle factors, particuarly through constant waste of one's personal energy - social, sexual etc.

 

In any case, the point to take away from this is humans are far more complex than modern (as opposesd to post-moden) models like to represent. As we progress in our practice one personally realizes you you can't actually model infinity.

[erdweir]

My experience is mixed with education. In the sixth grade I was singled out as being "gifted", whatever that means. In Junior High I was in honors classes but by the end of the eighth grade I had lost all interest and barely passed on the high school. I never passed the 9th grade and never made any effort to. When I started my third year in the 9th grade I realized it was never going to happen so i dropped out and got a GED.

 

If I had to say what it was that made me lose interest I would have to ay it was my own disillusionment and the violence, cruelty, lack of understanding of faculty and students. I feel like my creativity was deliberately attacked and repressed. I figured school was mainly for brainwashing and left.

 

10 years later I decided to go to art school in NY. I ended up minoring in philosophy. I had a much better experience, had a couple of bad teachers but allot of good ones, and my artwork and thinking improved. Now in my early 30's i left college with a BFA. I started wandering and getting more spiritual, reducing my chronic tension, learned to sleep at night, and opened myself to some better ways of being. I tried various forms of holistic therapy and meditation and eventually ended up with taoist practices.

 

most of my friends from my teenage years were drop outs like me, and we were all pretty self destructive punk street kids, but we all made art and music too. I think our creativity saved us from a worse fate. A few of these people were interested in the occult, as was I, but there were too many drugs and f'd up things happening so their quest ended badly. I managed to clean myself up and restart. I am the only one of them to finish college and most of them never went to any college at all.

 

The friends I made after this period in my life were more educated, most have a Bachelor degree, some have graduate degrees, a few pursued doctorates. some of these friends have spiritual practices, they do Reiki, Martial Arts, Yoga, Tantra, Acupuncture, etc. All of these people who have spent time developing themselves spiritually also went to college and got degrees and none of them are as self destructive as the people I grew up with.

 

None of my friends or family members are what you would call religious. My parents and most of my friends have no beliefs. I know a couple of rabid atheists who are what I would call rationalist fundamentalists and are about as bad as any other kind of true believer. I myself am sort of agnostic sometimes but lean toward pantheism.

Edited May 2, 2009 by erdweir

[Aasin]

I grew up in a very religious household. Church every Sunday no questions asked. I always hated it and had to go to a Catholic school for a while. I actually considered going into the clergy though but that idea didn't last long.

 

After being introduced to communism and the fact that a priest at my church ended up getting a woman pregnant made me pretty much lose all faith. I only found Taoism in my senior year in high school.

 

As a sophomore in college, I see a lot of debauchery and I see that my Catholic beginnings and current Taoist practices play a huge role in my life. I'm often associated as being one of the goody goodys around because of how I live my life. I don't smoke or drink even when everyone else around me is doing so. People say they have a lot of respect for me but a lot of people seem threatened by me also. I don't let that bother me though.

[松永道]

Ahh an excuse for some nostalgia. I guess the night is right.

 

Born to a normal suburban family. Selected in elementary school for the school district's "high potential" program which basically meant through the end of high school me and a handful of other students got to cut class once a week to attend interesting lectures and play mental puzzles. Certainly made my ego feel oh *so* special.

 

Driven by interest in the mind/body and human potential but still confined by the firm grip of "success", I studied the biomedical sciences. Attended a liberal arts school I also majored in acting - a field that struck me as a far more interesting study of the mind than the psychology track.

 

Graduated from college with honors, scored in the 98.5 percentile on the MCATs, worked as an Americorps volunteer to gain some "real life" experience before going to medical school.. and in the course of real life became utterly depressed.

 

It seemed so meaningless, something was certainly missing, but what was it? Funneled by education to that point, I learned to fill in the blanks, but here was a blank with no concrete answer. I guess I had an existential crisis. And, to make a long story short, I resolved it by taking responsibility for that blank in my life - I stopped blaming it on what I didn't have; external things - and I did something about it. I decided to live the life most interesting and meaningful to me. And what followed flowed naturally from learning qigong, to studying chinese medicine, to winding up in China.

 

And still life flows along, the river of yuanfen, and I swimmer with her current.

 

 

But I'm not a Daoist, Buddhist, Christian, theist or atheist. I'm not agnostic either. Maybe I'm still to young to understand. But it just seems life provides what make of it. A dance of paradox between fate and freewill.

[innerspace_cadet]

I was raised Irish Catholic, and went to Catholic school for 10 years. I eventually went on to getting a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, and then got a master's degree in library science from Drexel University. I no longer consider myself much of a Catholic; I don't believe in the Church's doctrines. I practice both Buddhist and Taoist meditation, but I don't consider myself very religious, probably because I am skeptical by nature. I tend to challenge everything that seems like bunk to me.

[kathyli]

I have PhD degree and been offered professor position. I'm disciple of Daoist Wang Liping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoist_Wang_Liping). Here is my brief introduction. http://www.retreat.dao-de.org/kathy/kathy.html.

 

As I know, many Daoism seekers in Master Wang Liping's dragon gate lineage have doctoral degree and have the professorship in institutes.

 

Dragon Gate Retreat, (USA -- Russia), May 23-25, synchronize with the Daoist Master Wang Liping !

http://www.dragongate.dao-de.org/news/news.html

[hagar]

Okydoky...

 

MA in Philosophy. Major in Literature, and Psycology. Now, for some obscure reason, and out of sheer despair, I ended up in nanoscience. How about that. Probably what fatherhood does to ya.

 

Student life is goood. Except for feeling bad for not studying.

I skied and climbed most of my study years, and the rest I sat in cafes and drank expensive coffee.

Financed some retreats with student grants, and had some good laughes.

 

Utterly disenchanted with intellectual life though. See how it goes with spiritual life.

 

What I regret is not being true to myself, traveling less, and becoming a mountainguide.

 

Instead, I'm stuck in a cubicle everyday tapping a keyboard.

 

Well, its not all bad.

 

h

[Josh Young]

Why do we conflate intellect with social/vocational obedience training?

Why do we pretend that it amounts to education?

 

Education is a rare thing, even among those with several degrees.

[DalTheJigsaw123]

Some college... it was actually a Catholic Seminary. I started having OBE's and that was the end of any "traditional" religious education for me. LOL I still consider myself a Christian and Catholic in particular but I am sure the Pope would say differently. Thats ok though... we just wont tell him.

 

What do you do now?

[rain]

Okydoky...

 

MA in Philosophy. Major in Literature, and Psycology. Now, for some obscure reason, and out of sheer despair, I ended up in nanoscience. How about that. Probably what fatherhood does to ya.

 

Student life is goood. Except for feeling bad for not studying.

I skied and climbed most of my study years, and the rest I sat in cafes and drank expensive coffee.

Financed some retreats with student grants, and had some good laughes.

 

Utterly disenchanted with intellectual life though. See how it goes with spiritual life.

 

What I regret is not being true to myself, traveling less, and becoming a mountainguide.

 

Instead, I'm stuck in a cubicle everyday tapping a keyboard.

 

Well, its not all bad.

 

h

 

hagar

my husband had an employee who recently mede that dream come true. you can have his adress?

any way I am sure this dream will come back toyou later in life as fairly the same dream just slightly differently dressed.

 

love